Position Paper

Exploring measurement and evaluation methods for accessibility.

Usability Professionals Association

Annual Meeting – Lake Las Vegas, Nevada

Tuesday 26 June 2001

Patrick Larvie, Ph.D.

Small Pond Studios

San Francisco, CA

Patrick@smallpondstudios.com

www.smallpondstudios.com

I am a cultural anthropologist by training, and have been working in user experience design and usability evaluation for the past five years. I have worked extensively in Latin America, where I directed interaction design for a Brazilian portal. In the United States, I have conducted usability evaluations, user experience studies and currently work with a user centered design practice in San Francisco. Projects I am currently working on include redesigns of applications for Internet enabled toys, a web site for caretakers of children with learning differences and various retail web sites. I am responsible for maintaining empirical contact with users and of keeping an internal record of our testing. Perhaps most relevant to this workshop, I am charged with designing and executing studies of end users to inform the design process from beginning to end. It is in this capacity that questions related to accessibility standards – particularly as they apply to the Internet – are critical to my every day work.

As an anthropologist with a practice in the design of on-line interactions, I see accessibility not only as a parameter of good design, but also as a way of questioning conventional wisdom about the nature of technology. Technology presumes and requires certain relationships between people and machines – such as the ability to understand the rather peculiar iconographic language of the Internet in the US. Often, the unstated presumptions that technologies make about the humans that use them affirm rather than challenge ideas of ability and disability, re-interpreting mechanisms of exclusion as principles of design. Some of the issues that I’ve come across in the past few years wouldn’t ordinarily be classified as having to do with accessibility as that term has come to be used in the US. Nonetheless, I see them as matters central to access. These issues include:

• Language. Most Internet applications presume that end-users possess certain minimum skills and capacities related to visual acuity and the comprehension of written language. How might concepts of accessibility address these presumptions, especially from the perspective of those with limited language skills (e.g. those for whom English is not a primary language), impaired vision or difficulties with reading (whether from the eye strain of a computer or because of limited comprehension)?

• Perception and comprehension. Not everyone sees and hears in the same way. Parents and children with learning differences might require designers of web pages, computer games and CD ROMs to take into account he specific needs of children with dyslexia, ADHD, and other conditions that might impact users’ perception of content. We classify thing like dyslexia as “learning differences” or “disorders” mainly because they impact the relationship of those said to have them with school systems – one of the institutional pillars of US society and one of the primary means –or barrier – to full social enfranchisement. How might these differences in perception and comprehension impact ideas of accessibility?

• Motor skills. As mechanical devices, computers and other Internet enabled machines (e.g. cell phones, toys) presume certain levels and types of motor skills, always related to visual or (to a lesser extent) auditory comprehension. How might accessibility standards address these presumptions for those whose skills might be considered within “normal range” but who do not necessarily have experience operating keyboards or a mouse? To what extent is the ease-of-use of a mechanical device a matter of accessibility?

• Infrastructure. Most people in the world don’t have access to a computer or the Internet. Among those who do, most have slow access and computers that might be considered “outdated” in the offices of US technology experts. Groups with little or low-grade access to computers and telephony might think of accessibility as meaning access to the devices or means through which they could use technologies. Does accessibility mean taking into consideration the real limits of end-user infrastructure, such as slow computers and noisy phone lines?

I understand that many of these issues do not get at the typically legal meanings that we associate with accessibility in the United States. But as a researcher and as a member of a design team committed to producing good results for lots of different kinds of people, I’m hoping to learn about and discuss accessibility in both broad and narrow terms. I hope that the workshop provides not only a forum for understanding accessibility as a requirement or minimum standard for existing applications, but also as a continuous pressure for evolving and improving design.